Deaf Teenage Girl Now Hears With Her Brain

VIDEO [CC] - Thanks to special technology, 14-year-old Maggie Gleason can now hear. But the really remarkable thing is that she's hearing with her brain, not her ears.



CLEVELAND - Maggie Gleason, 14, who was born Deaf, heard sound for the first time in her life when hearing specialists at University Hospitals (UH) Case Medical Center turned on an innovative electronic device called an auditory brainstem implant (ABI). The implantable device provides a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly Deaf.



Maggie was born without cochleas, the small snail-shaped bones in her inner ears which house the auditory (hearing) nerve. As a result of her condition, she had no auditory nerve. Maggie had to wait for a technology like ABI to advance to a stage where it could help her. ABI bypasses the ear and stimulates the brain stem.



According to one of her surgeons, Maroun Semaan, MD, of UH Case Medical Center, Maggie may be the first teen with this device for absent cochleas.

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"For someone who has never heard, the perception and awareness of sound is extremely helpful," said Dr. Semaan, Director, Otology, Neurotology, and Balance Disorders at UH Case Medical Center and Associate Professor, Otolaryngology, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.



ABI is a prosthetic hearing device that stimulates neurons directly at the human brainstem, bypassing the inner ear and hearing nerve entirely, which in Maggie's case, did not even exist. The device consists of a tiny radio receiver implanted underneath the skin and tiny platinum electrodes implanted into the brain stem. ... READ MORE: http://usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/01/30/teen-hears-brain-ears/